Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

Sometimes, I feel like the only person in the world who has a hard time loving Vonnegut. It’s not that I don’t enjoy any of his work—Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night both got positive reviews here—but there’s a part of me that feels like his grandfatherly tone and clever prose disguise a worldview that is empty, or at least shallow. Sirens of Titan did nothing to abuse me of that notion; although I enjoyed it, it’s by far the worst Vonnegut I’ve read.

The plot jumps everywhere, but in a nutshell, it follows a man named Malachi Constant, who has been marked by the universe to serve an important purpose. He’s informed of his destiny, although not of the purpose itself, by Winston Rumfoord, a man who’s gotten unstuck in time and space, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, and knows how everything shakes out. Malachi, in the course of the book, goes from the richest man in the world, to a nameless grunt on Mars, to an accidental pioneer on Mercury, and finally back to earth. It’s difficult to talk about the issues I had with the book without spoilers, so

SPOILERS.

Upon returning to earth, Malachi finds that he has become the figurehead of a new religion, one which sees the universe as a series of accidents. In a series of incidents orchestrated by Rumfoord, Malachi parallels Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and subsequent betrayal, although he is merely sent to another planet to live, rather than crucified, along with his unwilling wife and weird kid. Once on the planet, Malachi meets a Tralfamadorian named Salo who’s been stranded for years, waiting on a replacement part for his spaceship, a part that just happens to be Malachi’s son’s good luck charm.

In the end, we learn that Malachi’s entire existence—in fact, earth’s whole existence—has been orchestrated by the Tralfamadorians to get Salo his missing piece. This might work as a sort of punchline, although no one would want to spend a whole novel getting there, but Vonnegut doesn’t take that tack. Instead, Malachi’s existence, which has been more or less pointless, is glossed with probably the book’s most famous quote:

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”

Keep in mind, Malachi has just learned that his entire life was predetermined for him by an alien race so that he could play the part of a cosmic UPS man, and he accepts it peacefully. I realize that Vonnegut is the patron saint of humanism, and there’s a very strong subtext to the novel that what made Malachi’s life worthwhile was not simply being a pawn of the universe but in the things that he did throughout his life. This, however, is undercut by Malachi’s complete lack of choice in the matter—he was a puppet, he didn’t lead a particularly happy life, and he had no choice in the matter. To his credit, Vonnegut acknowledges this at the very end of the novel, when Malachi dies and is given, by Salo, a hallucination of Heaven—but it's a cold comfort, an ending as empty as Malachi’s life.

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

While reading the AV Club’s recent review of the movie adaptation of Vonnegut’s Slapstick, someone in the comments noted that it was difficult to make good movies from Vonnegut’s stories because his themes tend to be so dark that, without his bleakly humorous narrative voice to leaven them, his stories are almost unbearably depressing. I couldn’t get that thought out of my mind while reading Mother Night; less funny than Cat’s Cradle and less hopeful than Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night would be a real wrist-slitter without Vonnegut’s tone.

The main character is Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American spy who disguised himself by acting as a Nazi broadcaster and propagandist during World War II. The novel opens as he is dictating his life story. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, because a lot of its power comes from the way it plays with its main theme, identity. It’s all right there in the quote at the start of this review: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

That’s a fair summation of the entire book, probably even moreso than the plot description. Virtually every character given significant word count is something besides what they appear to be—or are they? When Campbell is preparing to leave Germany after the war, he tells his German father-in-law goodbye, to which his father-in-law replies that he’d hoped, ever since the marriage, that Howard would turn out to be a spy, but then he recants:

'And do you know why I don't care now if you were a spy or not?' he said. 'You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'Because you could nev­er have served the enemy as well as you served us,' he said. 'I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler — but from you.' He took my hand. 'You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.'

The central question of this passage, and the whole book, isn’t exactly subtle, but it is powerful: is it significant what you actually are, if that doesn’t match up with what your actions, and, more importantly, is such a disconnect even possible? For Campbell, the dilemma is even worse, since, during his years of service, he never learned what information he was transmitting to America in his broadcasts—was the information he gave to the good buys as useful as the encouragement he gave to the bad?

I doubt Vonnegut would like my usage of the good/bad dichotomy though—aside from identity, a lot of the book deals with the difference between a person as an individual and a person as part of a whole: Vonnegut’s Nazis are as human and likable as his Americans, maybe moreso. The White Supremacists who eventually become Campbell’s protectors are friendlier and kinder to him than most of his compatriots throughout the war. Ultimately, Campbell even chooses to remain with friends who’ve betrayed him, in a nice synthesis of the two major themes—they are his friends because of what they’ve done, not because of what they are.

Of course, when it’s all said and done, there’s nothing particularly wonderful about Campbell’s decision to stick with friends he knows were planning to betray him, or, really, any of his other choices throughout the novel. They seem to follow the ethos of the man making them: they are nothing more than a way to mark time until he gets what he deserves, not for what he is, but for what he has shown himself to be.